Jonathan Lethem

Our guest tonight will be Jonathan Lethem, a (former) chat host himself at Wired's website, Head Space, and a brilliant sf writer. What follows is John Clute's article on him from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (available in paperback and CD-ROM).

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Jonathan Lethem -- (1964- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Cave Beneath the Falls" for Aboriginal in 1989, and who has published at least 35 stories since, the best known of them probably being "The Happy Man" (1991). His first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), meticulously rehabilitates the noir narrative voice cyberpunk writers notoriously acquired from writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, not only through the exactitude of the stylistic miming involved, but also because the setting, characters and overall ambience of the tale directly homage the earlier masters. The setting is a cloistral near future California; and the main character (who narrates) is a private eye in a world which has been reduced--rather than liberated--by the recursiveness of a culture near the end of its tether. In the terrified, shrinking world of Gun, With Occasional Music, it is socially unacceptable to ask personal questions; drugs like Forgettol continue to reduce the mental spaces available to humanity; a weary dictatorial police state gives thugs in its employ the right to punish citizens by reducing their "karmic points" until they have none, and are sent to deepfreeze; animals and babies, transmogrified by "evolution therapy", walk and talk. The nightmarishness of the book derives, perhaps, from a sense that JL has--as accurately as Steve Erickson--captured the surreal underlying bleakness of any future Hammett or Chandler might actually have imagined.

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To update John Clute's article, Jonathan Lethem's second novel, Amnesia Moon, (Tor Books) has had no less of an impact on the sf field than GWOM, and his first collection of short stories, The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, is now available in hardcover from Harcourt Brace.

Read a sample of JL's first novel at http://www.tor.com/sampleGunWithMusic.html

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